To understand the development of modern Western calligraphy it is important to survey historical writing styles—some of which profoundly influenced subsequent work—as well as how the materials of writing have been used. Most calligraphy is done with pen and ink on paper or parchment, although brushes and chisels are also used for making large letters on various surfaces. Later judgments about how the tip of a pen (usually a quill or reed) was cut, the angle at which it was held, and the formation of individual letters are conjectures based on the evidence of images of people writing, subsequent calligraphic practices, and the letters themselves. Very few artifacts and no treatises on the practice of writing are known to have existed before the 15th century, although instructions and descriptions of quill cutting published in the 16th century probably reflect long-standing practices.

Ancient Roman styles

Rustic capitals

.

The Latin and vernacular handwriting of western Europe descends in

an

a nearly unbroken line to the present day from the

point at which it is first observed, in the

1st century AD. The script used throughout the Roman Empire

at that time

for books and occasionally for formal documents is known as rustic capitals. The pen used to write this script was cut with a broad end and held so that its thickest strokes fell at an oblique, nearly perpendicular angle to the line of writing

, and it was lifted several times in the formation of a

. As is the case for most formal alphabets, the pen was lifted from the writing surface to make the serifs and other strokes for each single letter. The rustic

capital alphabet is “majuscule,” in that all the letters

alphabet consists only of capital, or majuscule, letters, most of which are contained between a single pair of horizontal lines. The

use of this

letters B, L, and F are sometimes taller than the other capitals to distinguish them from R, I, and E, which are similar in appearance.

This elaborate script, whose letter forms were

the natural outcome of using a broad pen held obliquely, was extended to certain sorts of inscription on stone and other materials, and it

used for inscriptions as well as manuscripts, is called rustic only by comparison with the magnificent square capitals

characteristic

typical of Roman imperial inscriptions

, whose forms were governed by the use of the chisel. Square capitals were seldom used in manuscripts except for titles. Rustic capitals continued in use for literary manuscripts until the 6th century, especially for texts of Virgil, but thereafter they appeared only in titles, down to the 12th century

. Both styles existed simultaneously, but very few manuscripts written in square capitals survive from ancient times. Square capitals, which require many more separate marks to make a single letter, are more often seen on inscriptions cut with a chisel that copied letters designed with a brush. Brushes were also used for large writing such as that seen in the graffiti in Pompeii.

Cursive capitals

The business hand of the 1st century, used for correspondence and for most documents, private and official alike, is known as cursive capitals. Here the pen, cut to a sharp narrow point, was held at the same an oblique angle similar to that used for rustic capitals, but the pen was lifted less often , and this “cursive” handling automatically produced (and the writing was faster). This cursive handling led to new and simpler letter forms such as (two strokes) for D(three strokes) and (two strokes) for E(four strokes). Some of these new letter forms are “minusculein effect minuscule, ” in that parts of them ascend or descend beyond the body of the letter (h, q) instead of being confined between a pair of lines, as in the majuscule rustic capitals (H, Q)a pair of lines that define the height of letters such as n or x (e.g., ascending letters such as d and descending letters such as p) instead of maintaining the uniformity in height of square capitals. Cursive capitals were also sometimes joined to following letters, further reducing the number of times the pen was lifted during the writing. This Roman style is hardly considered a calligraphic script, but it demonstrates how a formal alphabet was modified through rapid writing.

From the 2nd to the early 4th century, parchment was replacing papyrus as the standard writing material for books, and the codex was replacing the roll as their standard form. The evidence that survives from this period, during which biblical and other Christian literature was beginning to be copied extensively, is fragmentary, and its interpretation is still controversial. The main line of development, however, is clear enough. The elaborate letter forms of rustic capitals, with their numerous pen lifts, began to be abandoned, and experiments were made with new book hands in which the simplified letter forms of cursive capitals were written with a broad pen, sometimes held obliquely in the traditional way and sometimes held “straight,” so that its thickest strokes fell at right angles to the line of writing. It was probably the use of a straight pen that produced, for example, the conversion of cur sive cursive capital (axis oblique) into the fully minuscule d(axis vertical).

Uncials, half uncials, and cursive minuscule

At the end of this period of transition, in the For the 4th and 5th centuries, when the evidence becomes is more abundant, and it is known that two new book hands and a new business hand are found in came into use. The older of the book hands, called uncials (the name dates only from the 18th centurya name given this style by the 17th-century French paleographer Jean Mabillon), was originally written with a slightly oblique pensquare-edged pen, perhaps cut at an oblique angle; but, from the 6th century onward, a straight pen was used, and the hand began to look rounder and more contrived. Although it incorporates several of the pen without an oblique cut seems to have been used, leading to a rounder-looking letter. Occasionally these letters were written with several lifts and manipulations of the pen, which led one paleographer to dub them “artificial” uncials. Although they incorporate several cursive letter forms (, , h) of cursive capitals and has introduce two forms peculiar to itself this type of alphabet (, ), it also preserves certain forms, such as B, N, R, S, which differ only a little from the forms of rustic capitals; and all three kinds of letters are treated as majuscules, being confined as far as possible between one pair of linesuncials generally constitute a capital alphabet similar to Greek capitals of the 4th century, such as those seen in the Codex Sinaiticus. P and F are the only letters that consistently descend below the writing line.

From the 4th to the early 7th century, most Christian books—biblical, patristic, and liturgical—were written in the uncial script, and even for pagan literature it uncial almost entirely superseded rustic capitals. It survived the collapse of the Roman book trade. And, after the 6th century, when the production of all books, pagan as well as Christian, was taken over by the church—notably by the monasteries, such as the Vivarium founded in southern Italy by Cassiodorus, a scholar whose aim was to perpetuate Roman culture, and the houses that observed the Rule of St. Benedict—uncial script survived in many centres, especially for biblical and liturgical texts, down to the 9th century. Thereafter, like rustic capitals, uncials were used only for titles, and they, too, disappeared in the 12th century.

The younger of the two new book hands is called half uncial. This script was less popular than uncials and never broke their monopoly of on biblical and liturgical texts, althoughlike them it , like uncial script, half uncial was still being written in the 8th century and even, as a display scriptfor certain purposes, in the 9th century. The artificial name half uncial tells nothing about the origin or nature of the script. It Half uncial differs from early uncials in being written with a perfectly straight pen. One uncial script in its minuscule appearance; only one letter (N) remains remained more or less unchanged from the capital form, but the rest of the alphabet is cursive in origin. The distinguishing letter forms that differ most from uncials in half uncial are a, b, d, g, h, l, m, r, s; and the alphabet as a whole is frankly minuscule, since no attempt is made to confine it and s. There was no attempt to confine letters between a single pair of lines, as they had gained distinctive ascenders and descenders.

The new business hand of the 4th century and after is known as cursive minuscule. Like cursive capitals, it was written with a pointed pen, but the pen was held more or less straight. It , too, is a frankly minuscule alphabet and uses basically the same letter forms as half uncials, although the frequency in cursive minuscule of ligatures between letters tends to conceal the fundamental likeness between the two hands.

The letter forms that distinguish cursive minuscule and half uncials from rustic and cursive capitals and from uncials were evolved developed during the obscure period between the 1st and 4th centuries. The question of whether these forms were evolved developed in the sphere of the book hands or of the business hands is still undecided, but, whatever their origin, their importance for the subsequent history of European handwriting is paramount. They provided the material on which the Carolingian minuscule, which first developed appeared in the late 8th century, was based; , and that script (including its modifications) dominated Europe , in spite of severe modifications, until the end of the Middle Ages. Only in one other period were new letter forms evolved, between the 13th and the 15th centuries, in the group of scripts known as Gothic cursives; and the influence of these late innovations was ultimately cancelled canceled out, thanks to the revival of Carolingian minuscule in a pure form by the Italian humanists at the beginning of the 15th century.

The Anglo-Celtic and other “national” styles (5th to 13th century)

From the 5th century the relaxation of imperial Roman authority brought on a reassertion and growth of native cultures—that is, wherever the people were not wholly occupied in a savage struggle against barbarians for mere existence against aggressive tribes migrating across Europe (e.g., Avars, Slavs, and Saxons). The most isolated places, such as the province of Britain, responded strongly to this opportunity and at the same time were able to conserve important elements of the Roman civilization. With Ireland, which was never under occupation by the legions, it offered during Europe’s darkest age comparative peace and shelter for the development of the richest and most original of book styles.

The Insular manuscripts were produced at monasteries that were often on a barren rock in the sea or at an equally inaccessible siteisolated and inaccessible monasteries. According to tradition, the earliest centre of Christian learning in Ireland was established by the Romano-British apostle St. Patrick (fl. 5th century). A great successor, St. Columba, or Columcille(c. 521–597), whom legend credits with divine scribal powers, founded monastic houses at Derry and Durrow and then journeyed to the Inner Hebrides to found one on the lonely island of Iona c.in about 563. St. Columban, another Irish missionary, in much the same period was founding monasteries on the Continent: c.about 590 in Gaul (modern France) the Burgundian centre Luxeuil, from which Corbie in Picardy was organized, and St. Gall in Switzerland and Bobbio in Italy (about the years 612 to 614). From Iona a daughter house was founded in 635 on St. Cuthbert’s holy isle of Lindisfarne just off the Northumbrian coast of England. To the south the Northumbrian monk, later abbot and saint, Benedict Biscop (c. 628–689/690) established the twin monasteries of St. Peter at Wearmouth in 674 and St. Paul at Jarrow in 682. He endowed them with splendid collections of books and pictures gathered during repeated visits to Rome, so that, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, they constituted the most flourishing centre of Christian scholarship in western Europe and the meeting place of Hiberno-British and continental influences.

For the fine books made in the Anglo-Celtic centres, the majuscular script called Insular half uncial was deemed suitable rather than the pointed, more cursive Irish minuscule used for documents and vernacular texts. There is a high degree of conformity, attesting to their stylistic maturity, among such manuscripts as the Book of Kells (Trinity College, Dublin) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (British Museum, London), individual as they are in detail and ornament. After all, there is room for infinite variation where, in one-quarter of a square inch, 158 interlacements have been traced unerringly—by angels, it is was said. The Book of Kells, Codex Cenannensis to paleographers, was probably produced at Iona around 800. It has 339 leaves, 13 by 10 inches (33 by 25 centimetrescm) of noble dignified script in single column, jet black on well-made parchment, through which runs the most spirited and colourful of ornamentation, ranging from the red-dotted outlining of letters, which is as much a feature of the style as the wedge-topped ascenders, to the wildly extravagant full-page initials at the opening of Gospels. The other masterpiece of Anglo-Celtic calligraphy and illumination, the Codex Lindisfarnensis, was written in honour of St. Cuthbert shortly after his death in 687. It displays the same lively inventiveness, the love of fantastic animal and bird forms (zoomorphs), intricate interlacing, and even, rhythmic script, set off by generous margins.

The earliest of all extant manuscripts of the Insular style is the Cathach (“Battler”) of St. Columba (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin), who, according to legend, wrote it himself and, in the judgment of scholars, may actually have done so. Housed in its cumhdach (a sort of ark), it was carried into battle to ensure victory.

Besides the proud witness of such books as these to the Anglo-Celtic contribution, there were also the productions of continental centres influenced by St. Columban and his disciples, as well as books mainly in the Roman tradition but carrying the unmistakable sign of Insular influence. For instance, there are three that scholars believe were written in the 7th century at Bobbio , (Italy), in the monastery of St. Columban. They are Codex Usserianus Primus, now a treasure of Trinity College, Dublin, and two manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, known as Codex Ambrosianus C.26 sup. and Codex Ambrosianus D.23 sup. There is another, Codex Amiatinus (Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, Florence), of 1,030 leaves measuring 20 by 13 12 inches (51 by 34 centimetrescm), made in Northumbria in the 8th century. It is continental Roman in style with no concession to the Insular habit of ornamentation. This is understandable, for ornamentation—perhaps because it was designed for presentation to the pope.

Though the Insular minuscule was ready to handwidely known, the majuscular half uncial as the senior script was always given the place of honour and the preference for the fine Latin books of the Anglo-Celtic monasteries. Nevertheless, by the 8th century the minuscule was developing into a disciplined book hand, as seen in the copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica (c. 731; Cambridge University Library). The spiky, ligatured, compactly written style migrated early to the Continent and, by the beginning of the 8th century, was at home in the Anglo-Saxon foundation of Echternach, in what is now Luxembourg. Fulda and Würzburg , in (Germany), were other important centres abroad of Insular culture and book production in this style.

The Merovingian , in (France, ) and the Visigothic , in (Spain, ) are two more varieties of minuscular script that grew out of Latin cursive after the withdrawal of the Roman authority. In the Luxeuil monastery, in Burgundy, the minuscule attained in the 7th century the characteristics of a fine book handbut for only a short period, when the reforms under Charlemagne took effect. In the Iberian Peninsula the Visigothic style was in use from at least the 8th to the 12th century. It has the verticality of emphasis that is common to the other hands out of the same cursive background, when deliberately written, with and its weighted ascenders are carefully topped by flat serifs.

The southern Italian script of the style called Beneventan, nurtured in the motherhouse of the Benedictine Order at Monte Cassino, was the “national” hand that rose to the status of calligraphy and held its position well into the 13th century, an active literary life of more than 500 years. This type of script has a peculiar jerky rhythm and retains individual cursive forms, which, together with the abundance of abbreviations and ligatures, make reading quite difficult.

Carolingian reforms in the scriptorium (8th and 9th centuries)

The literary and ecclesiastical reforms carried on undertaken in the latter part of the 8th century and the early 9th century by order of the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne set the highest of standards for the making of books throughout his Western empire. The extensive educational program , looking forward to and the production of new authorized versions of the Vulgate, the missal, and other liturgical works , he placed in the charge of the learned led Charlemagne to invite the English cleric Alcuin of York . The Emperor persuaded Alcuin to leave his position at the head of the cathedral school of York and the excellent library he had gathered there, first to become to come to France to oversee the making of these manuscripts. Alcuin first became master of the palace school at Aachen, then at Tours as abbot of St. Martin’s to conduct the literary activities centred at the well-established scriptorium (writing room) there.

Before taking up the abbacy in 796, Alcuin was responsible for, or at least inspirer of, the most precious of Carolingian codices, the so-called Golden Gospels. These were a series of illuminated masterpieces written mainly in gold and often on purple-stained vellum. The most famous is the Godescalc Gospels (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), written before 783 for Charlemagne, the body of the text in uncials and the dedication in Carolingian minuscule. The most luxurious is the Saint-Médard Gospel Book (Bibliothèque Nationale), written entirely in gold uncials and illuminated with full miniatures, initials, etc., in gold and silver on purple ground.

Alcuin carried forward the work of the St. Martin scriptorium in the spirit of a true classical renascenceGer. (Aix-la-Chapelle), then went to Tours, France, to lead the Abbey of St. Martin.

Scholars have concluded that Alcuin may have been more a text editor and general overseer of the project than inventor of the Carolingian alphabet. He probably selected this particular alphabet from existing manuscripts as the best one to use in copying new manuscripts. The fully developed hand can be seen in books written in Charlemagne’s court around the time of Alcuin’s arrival there in 781 or 782. For example, one of best known of the codices written in the Carolingian script, the Godescalc Gospels, was commissioned by Charlemagne on Oct. 7, 781, and finished a year and a half later by the scribe Godescalc on April 30, 783. Also noteworthy are several other early Carolingian gospel books in which important headings are written in gold uncials; the books, done on purple-dyed skins, are illuminated with miniatures and use Carolingian script for their main text.

Under Alcuin, work was carried forward in the scriptorium of St. Martin’s abbey in the spirit of a true Classical renaissance. Each variety of traditional letter form was studied with a view to finding its norm by careful comparison with archetypes in ancient monuments and books. Thus, the square capitals, at the A hierarchy of scripts was established to distinguish different levels of text. At the top of the hierarchy of scripts, were modeled on Augustan inscriptions. For rustic capitals (capitales rusticae), the reformers adopted the style of those used for the text of such fine old codices as the Virgil fragment now in the Vatican. The roman uncial was restored to its simple dignity, as in well-made books of the 6th century, and the minor, or half, uncial was likewise restored to the plain elegance of that earlier period, after the degeneracy of the 7th century.

The model for the most valuable and characteristic of all the Alcuinian contributions, the Carolingian minuscule, has never been precisely determined. It may well have been a local variety of cursive or, more probably, a mixture of half uncial and cursive, in which Alcuin discerned the possibilities of his clear, round, flexible but disciplined script, comfortable to both scribe and reader. For, as regularized at the scriptorium of St. Martin, the minuscule was written with the shaft of the pen pointing somewhat to the right instead of straight back over the shoulder; though the letters were formed deliberately, even and round, stroke by stroke the same way every time by rule, the writing brought relative ease for the hand and eye. With the years some cursive features became more prominent—e.g., a tendency nearly to join certain letters and an occasional hint of “italic” in the slightly sloping, even, well-spaced lines. The incipits (the opening words of the text) were celebrated by means of display letters and a decorative initial that might come from any one of a number of sources, including Insular, Byzantine, and Merovingian scripts. Otherwise, the classic calm was maintained. The crowning achievement of the Tours school of scholars, scribes, and artists was reached in the mid-9th century, under Alcuin’s successors, in the Gospels of Lothair (Bibliothèque Nationale).

There are observable variations among the different Carolingian schools, but these are generally in small details. The most surprising departure is the Utrecht Psalter (University Library, Utrecht), written at Rheims, in rustic capitals and illustrated with fluent pen drawings in the Hellenistic fashion. Apparently, the whole work was devotedly copied in the 9th century from an old model.

The

were square capitals, which were used for book headings, and rustic capitals, used for the explicit (the last line of a book). Uncials signaled chapter headings, the table of contents, and the first line of text; half uncials were sometimes used for preface and the second text line; and Carolingian minuscules were used for the main text. Carefully drawn and coloured large Roman square capitals were used as major paragraph initials. This period marks the first time multiple writing styles were used both to decorate the text and to delineate categories of content.

The black-letter, or Gothic, style (9th to 15th century)

Carolingian minuscule remained the unrivaled book hand of western Europe through the 9th century, or nearly so. Then when a trend away from the this official imperial standards set standard appeared in . It can be observed progressing some places. For example, in the manuscripts written at St. Gall, in Switzerland, Sankt Gallen (Switz.) near the end of the 9th century and during the 10th. There is a tendency toward lateral compression of , scribes tended to compress the letters . This begins as the natural result of an easier laterally. They may have found the motion of the pen to be more fluid if they held it with the shaft out to the side rather than pointing back over the right shoulder. Scribes learned to With a change of the orientation of the shaft, scribes probably cut the pen’s writing edge obliquely so that it would be parallel to the top of the page even though the shaft was held in the slanting position, yielding a perpendicular stroke to accommodate the slanting position of the shaft. This position produced a perpendicular mark (minim) of maximum width.They were led on by the attractive novelty of bolder and bolder contrasts that eventually were to appear to the eyes of the Italian humanists in the Renaissance so brutal as to deserve the bad name of Gothic. Nevertheless, the more condensed,

By the end of the 12th century this strong vertical stroke was made more prominent as Carolingian letters were made narrower and some curved parts of letters were replaced with angles. The resulting style is called protogothic. It is widely believed that the more compact writing allowed significant economies in the amount of time taken in writing the books and the quantity of materials used and, therefore, in the cost of finished manuscripts.Blacktime (and thus labour) and materials. In addition, abbreviations, another way to save space, occurred with increasing frequency. Yet book margins remained wide, and the text usually occupied less than half the available area. In books of hours, literary manuscripts, and some religious tomes, these ample spaces were partly filled with decorations made by illuminators; and some manuscripts preserve readers’ marginal glosses or annotations.

Especially in northern Europe, a black-letter style of increasing density deepened the “colour” colour of the page and imparted to the northern, advanced, formal variety of book hand a matted aspect, or fanciful likeness to this formal book hand the appearance of woven fabric, that gave giving rise to the its generic name Textura. It is called by paleographers littera textualis formata or lettre de forme. As the script developed through the 11th and 12th centuries in Germany, France, and England, its curves broke into anglesof textura. In some books the more formal black-letter looks stiff and narrow, and the lines forming the letters attain the perfect regularity of a picket fence; the rigidity is relieved only by hairlines made with the corner of the square-cut nib, which add a playful note to an otherwise sombre hand. During the 13th and 14th centuries the size of writing was generally reduced. It became stiffer, and though in the following century (its last of undisputed sway) the script regained size, the proportions were disagreeably narrowed, and the letters, in lines as rigid and mechanically perfect as a picket fence, have angles sprouting hairlines apparently added with a crow quill afterward. Of this species of formal black-letter book hand, two kinds are distinguished by paleographers. One stands flat and unserifed on the base line and is known as textus prescissus. The other is completed with square or diamond-shaped feet and is referred to as textus quadratus. Though the former, and earlier, variety has superior claims for the calligrapher, the latter is the variety that was carried into printing types and hence into much wider use. In Italy the writing during the same period took on weight, but the curves of comparable book script never became angles. The senior script there was the rotunda, heavy but not pointed. The form persisted for liturgical work both as writing and printing type until late in the Renaissance. The north and the south had, of course, their other kinds of writing for court and business or personal uses. A cursive hand that flourished in France, Flanders, and England rose to favour in the 15th century as a vernacular book script. This littera bastarda, or lettre bâtarde as it is termed in the vexed nomenclature of paleography, for all its high style as attained in fashionable books, was close kin to the epistolary “running secretary” commonly written by northern Europeans and early American settlers until it grudgingly yielded in the 17th century to italic scriptblack-letter scripts became quite small in some manuscripts, especially Bibles, such that 10 or more lines of writing might fit in an inch (2.5 cm).

Paleographers have distinguished four types of black-letter (textualis) styles that were used in Germany, France, England, and Italy: prescissa, quadrata, semi-quadrata, and rotunda. Textualis precissa is identified by the way the bottoms (feet) of several of the minims end horizontally above the writing line. The feet of the minims of textualis quadrata are made up of diamond shapes, and they match the serifs found at their tops. Quadrata was used for early German printing types (e.g., the Gutenberg Bible) and became widely used in both type and calligraphy, although the precissa was an earlier and more elegant letter form. In Italy rotunda was the favoured book hand through the 15th century. It shares the dense colour of quadrata but not its angularity. Rotunda letters are condensed with sharp curves where the strokes change direction, and the feet of the minims end with an upward curve of the pen. Unlike quadrata, which spread throughout the printing community of northern Europe, rotunda had little influence on type design. Semi-quadrata, as the name implies, bears a close resemblance to quadrata but mixes that hand’s diamond-shaped foot serifs with the upwardly curved bottom terminals of rotunda.

There are also cursive forms of black-letter scripts. One such style—used extensively in French vernacular books—is called cursiva bastarda, lettre bâtarde, or simply bâtarde, the word bastard indicating its mixed parentage of formal black letter and casual cursive script. Although the script is not truly cursive (there are several pen lifts within and between letters), the freedom with which it is written (e.g., in deluxe Burgundian manuscripts), the flaglike serifs on some ascenders, the fusion of adjacent curved shapes, the use of an uncial-style d, and the rightward slope of the letters f and long s give this hand a vivacity unrivaled by other black-letter styles. The less formal bastard secretary cursive, which slopes slightly to the right and features looped serifs on some ascenders, was equally at home in French and Flemish manuscripts of the late 14th and 15th centuries.

The scripts of humanism (14th to 16th century)

Under Inspired by the inspiration of the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, who started the collecting of ancient Francesco Petrarch—who is credited with starting the practice of collecting ancient Roman manuscripts, coins, medals, and other “antiques,” the essentially literary artifacts—the literary and philosophical movement called humanism engaged a group of scholars at in Florence in the latter part of the 14th century and opening decades of the 15th. Their growing enthusiasm for antiquity led them on an ever-widening search for Latin books and ancient monuments, in order that they might restore the lost heritage of Rome. Classical authors written in the clear Carolingian minuscule with display lines in lapidary style (i.e., in the style of ancient inscriptions cut on stone) appealed to them as though straight from the time of Cicero instead of from the 10th to 12th centuryduring the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Through literary and archaeological research they sought to restore what they believed was their lost heritage. Many of the manuscripts they found had been transcribed during the 9th through 12th centuries in Carolingian minuscules with titles in pen-made Roman capitals. The humanists believed mistakenly that these manuscripts originated in the ancient world and therefore that the writing styles in them were the scripts used by the ancient Romans. Reverently, Coluccio Salutati, the late 14th-century chancellor of Florence who followed Petrarch as leader of the movement, and his fellow humanists imitated the predominant old script, which they spoke of as the called lettera antica to distinguish it from the ordinary modernacontemporary lettera moderna, a version of black-letter stylerotunda.

Two protégés of Salutati, Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli, are credited with developing , on the basis of these studies and experiments among old manuscripts, the two fundamental scripts of humanism. Poggio, at the very fundamental writing styles of humanism based on the scripts found in Carolingian manuscripts. At the beginning of the 15th century, produced the Poggio Bracciolini, a professional scribe, produced a round, formal writing humanist book hand that, after polishing refinement by a generation of scribes, served as the new art of printing as prototype of for “roman” type fonts. He promptly followed up this achievement by introducing into his manuscripts the square capital letters as used on ancient monumentsTo the minuscules he added a pen-made style of square capitals similar to those seen on early Roman monuments for the majuscules, thereby linking the two disparate scripts.

Later in the 15th century the rage for epigraphic inscriptions brought (inscriptional) lettering brought into the field such enthusiasts as Cyriacus of Ancona, Felice Feliciano and Giovanni Giocondo of Verona, and his fellow townsman Giovanni Giocondo into the field and, from Padua, Giovanni Marcanova, Bartolomeo Sanvito, and Andrea Mantegna . They from Padua; Mantegna, an engraver and painter, became one of the first Renaissance artists to incorporate classical lettering into his artwork. These men compiled their researches in great into sillogi, or anthologies, which, among other uses, gave calligraphers authoritative patterns for letter forms, ornament, and the correct spacing and placing of all display elements in their books. Feliciano, a calligrapher fond of ornament and fertile in invention, about 1460 first demonstrated how to construct the monumental roman capitals according to geometric rules.The second style of humanistic script appears earliest in the writings of Poggio’s friend Niccolò Niccoli, who was also an accomplished (anthologies of texts from Roman inscriptions) that provided models for square capital letters.

Feliciano, an antiquary, poet, scribe, printer, and alchemist, was the first person to attempt to demonstrate how monumental Roman capitals were constructed according to geometric rules. In a manuscript made by him between 1458 and 1469 (Vatican Library, Vat. Lat. 6852), Feliciano presents an inscriptional capital Roman alphabet, complete with the shadows formed by v-cut letters, along with rudimentary instructions on making these letters based on geometry. He used a straight edge and compass (devices not used by the ancient Romans), although some of the work is done freehand. Others would later pursue this geometric approach, well into the age of print—one of the best known proponents being the great German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer in the early 16th century.

The second influential style of humanistic script appeared in the writings of Poggio’s older friend Niccolò Niccoli, a scholar who was also an accomplished, though not a professional, scribe. His slightly inclined cursive, speedily written with a fairly narrowrounded nib at a good rate of speed, somewhat blunt nib, was to be to inspire the printers’ “italic” what the Poggian hand became to their “roman.” Niccoli’s innovation employed movements and rhythms close to those of the ordinary black-letter cursive familiar in everyday affairs. Indeed the script contains a sprinkling of current black-letter mannerisms and lends itself similarly to the joining or tying together of letters. The special character of this antica corsiva results from the narrowing of the bodies of letters due to the rapid up-and-down movement of the pen, facilitated by its being held with the shaft pointing at an angle away from the shoulder instead of straight back, producing this , not . As in italic fonts to this italic type, just as Poggio’s hand led to their roman type. Niccoli’s cursive script was informal and useful, not primarily artistic. It is a rapidly written script that links most letters and shows few pen lifts. Some black-letter mannerism appears in the writing. This early italic is not nearly as condensed as its later descendants; the letters (e.g., o or n) are nearly as wide as they are tall, but the script looks narrower than it is because it has very tall ascenders and wide spaces between the lines of writing. If the text is viewed from a mapwise orientation (with north at the top), the pen is held at an angle that produces thick strokes on the southwest and northeast quarters of the letter o, with corresponding thin strokes on its northwest and southeast parts. As in most italic type fonts to the present day, the form of a is distinctive; and , as are f, g(double bowl), k(closed top), and ſ (long s), which are all more or less reminiscent of black-letter current habits. For his headings Niccoli preferred roman capitals “italicized” by a slight inclination to the right.Both shapes. The capital letters are upright and in their Roman form. Poggio’s and Niccoli’s scripts were at once taken up and spread by other able scribes working at Florence scribes and scholars and spread throughout Italy in the first half of the 15th century, of whom the work of Giovanni Aretino, Giacomo Curlo, and Antonio di Mario, among others, is well recognized.Poggio himself in 1403 had promptly .

In 1403 Poggio carried his new script to Rome, where he later became papal secretary. Both his and Niccoli’s scripts were devoted exclusively to the service of Latin classical literature, but there was a difference. : Poggio, the professional notary, used his hand as a calligrapherin a way that can be described as calligraphic, while Niccoli used his as a copyist. The manuscripts of the former are set forth on fine parchment with meticulous care to formal details, such as even lines at the right-hand margin, and with handsome embellishment. Those of the latter are on paper, compactly and rapidly written, with attention to legibility and textual accuracy above all. There is an interesting parallel in the printed books of the following century. Ambitious Renaissance folios are convenient aid to copying. Further differences are seen in the work of the two men: Poggio wrote on fine parchment, took care to make lines end uniformly (justified), and drew elaborate display capitals and initials; Niccoli usually wrote on paper, used the simplest of pen-made Roman capitals for titles, and focused on textual accuracy. An interesting parallel is found in books printed in Italy in the 16th century: grand Renaissance folios were set in fine roman types, while the well-editedbut cheap little student books are just as naturally , inexpensive small books for scholars were set in italic type.

Typographic Although printing from movable type displaced the many copyists . At the same time printing gave impetus and new significance to the work of the calligraphers. They accepted the challenge of mechanized writing and for a while turned out the finest of humanistic masterpieces. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries the Paduan Sanvito and Pierantonio Sallando of Mantua, for instance, not only wrote the round humanistic script in a fashion worthy of the richest miniatures and illumination but also honoured the slender proportioned “italic” script by promoting it to a place in some of their proudest and most precious manuscripts.Sanvito’s folio and octavo classics in the humanistic cursive are also celebrated for vellum pages stained purple, yellow, green, or salmon pink and for lines of inscriptional capitals alternating gold, blue, lakeafter the middle of the 15th century, it also freed them from the tedious copying of books. (See also printing: History of printing.) The new breed of scribes turned out some of the finest manuscripts of any age; they are rightly considered calligraphers for their attention to the careful formation of letters and arrangement of text. In the last half of the 15th and the early 16th century the Paduan Bartolomeo Sanvito and the Mantuan Pierantonio Sallado, two of the region’s leading scribes, perfected both the roman and the italic hands and produced manuscript books of unparalleled beauty. Sanvito’s books on colour-stained vellum pages in humanistic book and cursive hands are also celebrated for pen-made inscriptional Roman capital letters in alternating colours of gold, blue, red, purple, violet, and green. The antica corsiva perfected by Most of his surviving manuscripts are copies of works by Classical authors such as Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Juvenal, and Sallust, but he also wrote out a few religious texts such as a book of hours, gospels, and the Chronica of the Church Father Eusebius of Caesarea. Many of the manuscripts are also lavishly illuminated by Sanvito and others. The antica corsiva (as italic was called at the time), used by late 15th-century papal scribes for rapidly inditing writing briefs issued by from the Vatican chancery, also won its way as the chosen medium became the preferred style of polite correspondence.

Thus, in By the early 16th century the versatile lettera da brevi(“brief script,” i.e., script used for papal briefs) or cancellaresca (chancery cursive), lively yet disciplined, responsive to wide variety in cut of nib and speed of movement, “chancery”), had become the common hand of both book and letter writing among scribes, scholars, and savants throughout Europe. Several characteristics contributed to the popularity of the script: it was lively yet disciplined in appearance; it was responsive to a variety of pen nib styles and tolerant of different writing speeds; and it was attainable by the novice and gratifying to the adepteither as book or epistolary hand, became a vehicle of the new learning throughout Christendom.

As written by the early 16th-century calligrapher and printer Lodovico degli Arrighi of Vicenza, the cancellaresca can range from eye-arresting contrasts of almost Gothic thick-and-thin strokes to a delicate, supple monotone tracery. The ascending letters, instead of terminating in serifs as with Sanvito or Sallando, now wave plumelike to the right, and the descenders are tending to balance them with a swing to the left. In 1522 Arrighi published at Rome his modest though revolutionary work Operina da imparare di scrivere littera cancellaresca. This, the earliest of printed writing manuals, or copybooks, held out to the public clear, simple directions with woodcut examples and invited everyone to learn in a few days how to write this fashionable hand for themselves. In effect, it announced the end of the era of the scriptorium and the beginning of the era of the writing master. Dependence upon attracting pupils and gaining a reputation with the public was thereafter reflected in the tendency to exploit novel or flashy scripts and extravagant ornament.

Writing manuals and copybooks (16th to 18th century)

The Arrighi Operina’s devotion to the chancery cursive is matched in single-mindedness only by Gerardus Mercator’s Literarum Latinarum (1540). Arrighi’s second publication, Il modo de temperare le penne (1523), is a more normal performance for the calligrapher, notary, printer, and erstwhile scriptor of apostolic briefs in the role of writing master. This book redresses the balance in favour of the popular scripts.

Arrighi’s elder contemporary and possible mentor, Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, writing master to the Venetian chancery, published his Presente libro in 1524, two years after the Operina; and Giovanni Battista Palatino published in 1540 at Rome his Libro nuovo d’imparare a scrivere. Though Tagliente was master of an elegant cancellaresca—his “living hand” is displayed in a holograph supplication to the Doge and council of Venice, 1491—as well as of the black-letter hands, he was out-of-date and prey to the vices of the old professional; e.g., his chancery specimens include a page of script leaning excessively to the right, and facing it is a page of similar script leaning away to the left, almost equally hard to read and useless. Unlike the author’s own hand in his 1491 supplication, the woodcut models here are acutely pointed. Palatino at the same time exhibits a rigid, sharp-angled cancellaresca formata in his excellent manuscript specimen (Bodleian Library, Canon. Ital. 196 fol. 44r), while his popular manuals offer relatively easygoing models for learners. In particular, the Palatino cancellaresca romana is a normal even-toned script, modest as to bulbed ascenders (testegiatta) and angle of inclination, displaying in its forms hospitality for bastarda variations (i.e., Gothicizing g, h, k, r). The fact that Palatino’s Libro nuovo, besides being the most complete, was the most widely disseminated of mid-16th-century books on writing bespeaks certain latitudinarian qualities along with marvellous virtuosity.

The propagation of the chancery cursive abroad was furthered by native manuals too. The Latin letters called italics were introduced into Germany by Casper Neff’s Thesaurium artis scriptoriae (1549); into Spain by a disciple of Palatino, Juan de Yciar, in his Recopilacion subtilissima (1548); into France by Pierre Hamon’s Alphabet de l’invention des lettres en diverses escritures (1561); and into England by means of A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (1570) by Jean de Beauchesne and John Baildon.

The pure Italian chancery hand was the favourite of court circles and humanist scholars through the second half of the 16th century. In England Roger Ascham, mid-16th-century schoolmaster to kings and queens, wrote and taught an exemplary cancellaresca, as did the late 16th-century Cambridge don Bartholomew Dodington. These and other educated Europeans, including Shakespeare, generally wrote the black-letter “running secretary.” For their part, the writing masters, in striving to reach an ever larger public, increasingly emphasized the compromise script intended to bring learners already indoctrinated in the common Gothic cursive to command more readily the fashionable italic style. The Opera nella quale si insegna a scrivere, of Vespasiano Amphiareo (Albertacci), had already offered at Venice in 1554 models that combined the overdisciplined strokes of Palatino with elements of black-letter mercantile hands (e.g., loops and running ligatures); to this hybrid cancellaresca that he claimed as his own invention, Amphiareo gave the accurate name of bastarda. Then Gianfrancesco Cresci of Milan, a Vatican scriptor, published his Essemplare (1560), to herald the oncoming Baroque and to reject vehemently the works and ways of Palatino and all his academic sort. He replaced their most stylish broad, chisel-bevelled nib and meticulous building up of disjoined strokes with a narrow, rounded-off pen flexible enough to respond to pressure and fluent in dashing off his much-inclined italic bastarda topped off dramatically with bulbous testegiatta. It is not too much to say that Cresci’s script, with the handsome set of swash capitals (to borrow the typographic term for these forms), not only established a revolutionary front for 17th-century calligraphy but also contained the germs of 18th-century “copperplate” and even Spencerian scripts. Cresci was the first in Italy to take advantage of copperplate engraving, though Giuliantonio Hercolani’s Lo Scrittor Utile (1574; plates engraved in 1571) was a close rival.

The principal French hands of the period were the national black-letter cursive called lettre françois or financière, which was commonly used in ordinary affairs, and the aristocratic italienne bastarde. In the Low Countries, examples of excellence are provided by Clement Perret in his Exercitatio alphabetica (1569), and by Jan van de Velde in his work Spieghel der Schriftkonste (1605), the fame of which was carried down through many generations of English penmen.

In Britain and its empire, the italienne bastarde was largely disseminated through Edward Cocker’s engraved copybooks and manuals. Known variously as the “new mixt current” or the “speedy à la mode,” its concessions to the black-letter running secretary include the e looped at the top like a latter-day Palmer Method o and what has been termed the upside-down r, which is easily misread as u by humanistic eyes. Nevertheless, in the second half of the 17th century, italic writing won decisively. By the opening of the 18th century, a chastened, businesslike version was developed in London by John Ayres and his younger contemporary writing masters eager to serve commercial demands. The small, narrow variety of Italian-French script, known as the Italian hand, was relegated to ladies’ use as something suited to frail capacities, while the robust strain, called English round hand or “copperplate,” was considered fit to dominate an epoch of trade supremacy.

Though the transition from black letter had been even more accelerated in the American colonies, Boston in New England was one of the last bastions of calligraphy in the trend toward countinghouse and commercial-college penmanship. The traditional foundations were laid solidly by the 18th-century writing master Abiah Holbrook, who raised a group of young Bostonian proficients at the South Writing School and left a fine manuscript, The Writing Master’s Amusement (1767), in personal testimony.

As the 19th century advanced, the competition constantly mounted among systematists emphasizing the plain, practical business hand and decrying the “ornamental branches.” Those who loved to flourish quill pictures of bounding deer or calligraphic portraits of national heroes were increasingly placed on the defensive. Certain religious sects clung to their heritage of individual styles of writing as an art. The Shakers, under the influence of visions, wrote and drew elaborate spiritual manuscripts. Most of these pieces that still remain are in the round hand and Spencerian scripts of their contemporary world. Other religious sects, such as the Moravians and Mennonites settled in Pennsylvania, produced out of their background old-country culture bold and handsomely coloured decorative pieces generally called Frakturs because of the script in which their so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch” is presented. Even Queen Elizabeth I of England wrote what Shakespeare called the “sweet Roman hand.”

Sixteenth-century Italians were the first to publish books on the making of letters: Divina Proportione (“Divine Proportions”) by Luca Pacioli appeared in Venice in 1509, Sigismondo Fanti’s Theorica et practica (1514; “Theory and Practice”) was also published in that city, and Francesco Torniello’s Opera del modo de fare le littere maiuscole antique (“Work on the Way to Make Ancient Majuscule Letters”) came out in Milan in 1517. These books focus more on theory than on practice; Fanti’s even shows how to construct gothic rotunda minuscules using geometry.

Ludovico degli Arrighi published the first practical manual on writing cancelleresca, the hand now usually called italic. His La operina (“The Little Work”), which, although dated 1522, was probably printed in Rome about 1524, became a prototype for subsequent writing manuals. Arrighi shows how chancery minuscule letters are made; he states rules for joining and spacing letters and for spacing words and text lines, and he supplies practice exercises. Almost simultaneously the Venetian writing master Giovanantonio Tagliente published Lo presente libro insegna la vera arte… (c. 1524; “This Book Teaches the True Art…”). Both books were printed from woodcuts that reproduced the writing of their authors; both promised results without the aid of a teacher; and both presented a cancelleresca script that varies somewhat from formal humanistic cursive writing. Whereas Sanvito and Sallado produced ascenders that terminated in serifs resembling bird beaks, both Arrighi and Tagliente presented flaglike terminals on the letters b, d, f, h, k, and l, as if a westerly breeze were blowing them over. Arrighi subsequently published Il modo de temperare le penne (“How to Sharpen Quills”), which was actually a copybook of various alphabets, including Roman capitals and black-letter minuscules. Tagliente’s manual also included the Latin alphabets and added Hebrew and Arabic alphabets.

In his introduction to La operina, Arrighi admitted that the printed woodcut examples could not compare to “the living hand,” and his manuscripts proved this to be true. He wrote that he published La operina to satisfy the large demand for copies of his script; no doubt he also hoped to attract pupils to his writing school in Rome. Whatever the drawbacks of reproduction, professional calligraphers did not avoid print. In fact, printing was embraced by many writing masters as a means for spreading both the art of writing and their reputation. Several 16th-century scribes, including Arrighi and Tagliente, even designed typefaces for printers. Thus, although printing may have put an end to the medieval scriptorium, it can also be said to have launched the era of the professional writing master.

Writing manuals and copybooks (16th to 18th century)

From the 16th through 18th centuries two types of writing books predominated in Europe: the writing manual, which instructed the reader how to make, space, and join letters, as well as, in some books, how to choose paper, cut quills, and make ink; and the copybook, which consisted of pages of writing models to be copied as practice.

In Rome in 1540 Giovanni Battista Palatino published his Libro nuovo d’imparare a scrivere (“New Book for Learning to Write”), which proved to be, along with the manuals of Arrighi and Tagliente, one of the most influential books on writing cancelleresca issued in the first half of the 16th century. These three authors were frequently mentioned and imitated in later manuals, and their own manuals were often reprinted during and after their lifetimes.

The first non-Italian book on chancery was by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. His Literarum Latinarum (“Latin Letters”), published in Louvain, Belg., in 1540, was written in Latin, then the universal language of scholarship; that fact must have increased the work’s appeal to northern European scholars who associated chancery with humanist learning. Mercator expanded on the Italian teaching method of showing, stroke by stroke, how each letter of the alphabet is made; like his Italian contemporaries, he grouped letters according to their common parts rather than alphabetically. Thus c, a, and d are presented together since they all begin with a common stroke c and are completed with a dotless i or l. His manual goes further than any previous one in presenting the order and number of strokes in making chancery capital letters. (The Italians merely presented examples of such letters to be copied.) Mercator also introduced the 45-degree pen angle for writing cancelleresca, something never suggested or practiced by Italian writing masters.

Juan de Yciar was the first in Spain to publish a copybook, the Recopilacion subtilissima (1548; “Most Delicate Compilation”). Two years later he published his Arte subtilissima (1550; “The Most Delicate Art”), in which he acknowledged his debt to the printed books of Arrighi, Tagliente, and Palatino. Like them he showed a variety of formal and informal hands and decorative alphabets. His manual differed from theirs in its inclusion of advice for teachers as well as for students.

The italic hand had little effect on publications in 16th-century Germany and Switzerland, where black-letter alphabets predominated. Johann Neudörffer the Elder was the first German to print a copybook. His Fundament…seinen Schulern zu einer Unterweysung gemacht (1519; “Foundation of…Instruction of His Pupils”) shows examples of German Kurrent (cursive), Kanzlei (chancery), and Fraktur (black letter). This Kanzlei bears no resemblance to Italian chancery; the name of the script is derived from the place where the script was used (a chancery is an administrative office) and does not describe a particular writing style. Neudörffer is considered the author of the definitive version of Fraktur script, a combination of the rigid textualis quadrata and the more relaxed bâtarde. This long-lived style was used as late as the 19th century by some German speakers in the United States and Canada. In 1538 Neudörffer published the first copybook to use an intaglio technique (i.e., printed from incised rather than raised areas of a plate). His Ein gute Ordnung… (“A Good Arrangement…”) contains etched writing examples produced as counterproofs—the incised plate produced writing with a mirror image, which was then transferred to plain paper while the ink was wet in order to give the letters in their correct orientation. Because this technique was cumbersome, having two separate steps, and did not produce a sharp image, it would be nearly 30 years before intaglio engraving was used again in a writing book. Most 16th-century German writing books, like those produced elsewhere in Europe, continued to be printed from woodcuts. Relief methods of printing, such as woodcut and movable type, required less pressure from the press and produced a correctly oriented page in one pass because the plate was made with a reversed image.

Wolfgang Fugger, a student of Neudörffer, published his Ein nutzlich und wolgegrundt Formular (“A Useful and Well-Grounded Form”) in Nürnberg in 1553. The work reveals many of the techniques used in teaching formal handwriting and calligraphy in the 16th century. Detailed drawings show how to cut a quill and the right and wrong way to hold a pen. Most of the included alphabets are diagrammed stroke by stroke. Some rather remarkable pages show how to transform black-letter capitals into ornate initials by the addition of a few formulaic flourishes. Fugger’s manual presents, in addition to the standard German and Italic hands, a geometrically constructed Roman capital alphabet and the Greek and Hebrew alphabets, acknowledging a debt to Italian writing books. But Fugger’s roman and italic minuscule scripts are rather poorly done and show how little these hands were understood or practiced in German-speaking countries during the 16th century.

The first writing books by French, Dutch, and English authors appeared in the second half of the 16th century. Like the German authors, these followed the Italian method of teaching the alphabets. Their books generally featured a rather spiky cursive secretary hand as well as some version of the Italian chancery script. By the time most of them were published (between 1561 and 1575), italic writing had undergone radical changes under the influence of the Vatican scribe Gianfrancesco Cresci.

Cresci published three writing books: Essemplare di piu sorti lettere (1560; “Model of all Sorts of Letters”), Il perfetto scrittore (1570; “The Perfect Writer”), and Il perfetto cancellaresco corsivo (1579; “The Perfect Cursive Chancery”). In relation to earlier works, these books show a chancery script written with a narrower pen, and as a result there was less contrast between the thick and thin letter strokes. Cresci’s hand was further characterized by a steeper letter slope to the right (10 to 15 degrees rather than the earlier 5 to 8 degrees); more joins between letters; and alternate forms for o, h, p, r, and d. The most striking characteristics of Cresci’s italic, however, are the pronounced, bulbous serifs on the ascenders, called testeggiata. Cresci’s newly decorative minuscules and florid capitals were harbingers of the coming fashion in penmanship.

The Essemplare is finely printed from woodcut blocks, but seven years after its publication a new and better method of reproducing elaborate calligraphy appeared. In 1567 Pierre Hamon, secretary and royal writing master to Charles IX of France, published the first copybook printed from engraved metal plates, Alphabet de plusiers sortes de lettres (“Alphabet of Several Sorts of Letters”). Although this title echoes the title of Cresci’s 1560 book, the works are different. Hamon devotes the first part of his book to various forms of the French secretary hand, a style he writes adding such wild embellishments that they seem to take on an independent existence, in contrast to the relatively orderly flourishes found in contemporary Italian writing books. Hamon also takes advantage of the metal engraving process by presenting free-form letters drawn in thin outlines, something beyond the capabilities of the woodcut. The second part of his copybook is given over to formal and informal styles of chancery, following Palatino’s models more than Cresci’s.

Hamon’s early use of metal engraving is generally overlooked in discussions of the printing history of writing books because of the extreme scarcity of his little book. Hamon was arrested in 1569 either for his Protestant religious beliefs, for forging the royal signature, or because he wrote some treasonable verses about the king. In any case, not only was Hamon executed that year, but all of his works were ordered destroyed.

The same year Hamon’s book appeared, the Flemish publisher-printer Christophe Plantin published the Dialogues françois pour les jeunes enfans (“Dialogues in French for Young Children”), which includes a conversation on the teaching of handwriting supposedly held between Hamon and a French physician and poet, Jacques Grévin. When Grévin asks Hamon which alphabet a child should learn first, Hamon recommends the cursive French secretary, followed by a dozen more hands, including a few italic styles.

The first copybook published in England, A Booke Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (1570; this title also translates Cresci’s), is the work of a French Huguenot immigrant writing master, Jean de Beauchesne, and John Baildon (or Basildon), about whom nothing further is known. Divers Sortes of Hands has characteristics of both writing manuals and copybooks: it includes instructions on how to make ink, cut a quill for writing, hold the pen (illustrated), and sit at a writing desk. Yet it does not explain how to write any of the 15 styles of handwriting it contains. Once again, secretary and other forms of gothic cursive hands predominate, with a few examples of “Italique” (as the book calls cancelleresca) letters. (Beauchesne himself was a master of this hand, however.)

Likewise, the anonymous A Newe Booke of Copies (1574) follows the pattern of Divers Sortes of Hands, with similar instructions and illustrations and emphasis on various secretary hands commonly used for writing legal and court documents. The focus of these books on commercial rather than calligraphic scripts probably reflects their most likely consumers—a merchant class in need of practical writing skill rather than a scholarly or courtly audience.

Around the middle of the 16th century, cancelleresca, or Italian chancery italic, had become the preferred hand of English intelligentsia and the royal court, who had learned it either directly from Italian or French writing masters (such as Beauchesne) or from printed books. Roger Ascham, a tutor to English nobility (including Queen Elizabeth I), wrote and taught an exemplary cancellaresca based on the one shown in Arrighi’s La operina, and the 16th-century scholar Bartholomew Dodington, a professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, wrote a fluid italic that might have been the envy of any professional writing master.

Toward the end of the 16th century the Italians were losing their dominance in the writing-book market despite the number of titles they produced. Engraving had rapidly become the preferred means of reproducing all sorts of writing, and cancelleresca was evolving. The first copybook to be printed in the Netherlands from engraved metal plates was the Exercitatio alphabetica (1569; “Alphabet Practice”) by the 17-year-old Clément Perret. Perret’s book contains examples in many different hands chosen to match the language of the text. The beautifully ornate writing in Exercitatio is somewhat overshadowed by the finely drawn cartouches that surround the examples, and it seems clear that this was a book not only for writers but also for artists, mapmakers, metalsmiths, and needle workers—in short, all those who used letters or borders in their work. Perret’s copybook was closely followed by the first engraved Italian writing book, Essemplare utile di tutte le sorti di l’re cancellaresche correntissime (1571; “Useful Examples of All the Sorts of Cursive Chancery”) by Giuliantonio Hercolani. This copybook is less ornate than Perret’s, but it clearly shows how metal engraving can reproduce the subtleties of any writing style done with a broad-edged pen.

The last quarter of the 16th century also marks the emergence of women from their relative obscurity in the field of calligraphy. They had played an important role in the production of manuscripts since the 8th century, when the oldest surviving Roman sacramentary (Vatican Library, Reg. lat. 316) was written out at a convent in Chelles, France, about 750. Nuns and laywomen were responsible for writing and illuminating manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages, but they, like monks and laymen of the time, often remained anonymous.

The first calligraphy by a woman to appear in a printed work was that of Jacquemyne (or Jacomina) Hondius, the sister of the Dutch publisher, cartographer, and calligrapher Jodocus Hondius. Two examples by her were included in the first international calligraphic anthology, the Theatrum Artis Scribendi (1594; “Display of the Art of Writing”), published in Amsterdam by her brother. Other important calligraphers of the day—such as Jean de Beauchesne, Ludovico Curione, Jan van den Velde, and Peter Bales—were also represented in the book.

Another writing mistress of distinction is Marie Presot. Like Beauchesne, she and her husband were French Huguenots, and they settled in Edinburgh about 1574. They set up a school there where her husband, Nicholas Langlois, taught French language and composition and Presot taught writing. A single surviving manuscript by her in the Newberry Library, Chicago, shows a fine mastery of the French secretary and cancelleresca hands. Like many writing teachers, Presot also trained her children in the art of writing, and one of them, as Esther Inglis, went on to become one of the most prolific calligraphers of the late 16th and early 17th century. Inglis (a translation according to the Scottish usage of her father’s name, Langlois, meaning English) specialized in writing miniature books in literally minuscule scripts in which some letters were as small as 1 mm (.039 inch) high. Many of the books, in addition to showing a variety of 16th-century calligraphic hands, were decorated by Inglis with paintings or pen drawings of flora and fauna.

The growing literacy of the period, promoted by the rise of commerce throughout Europe, encouraged the teaching of writing to women, who were often involved in running their spouse’s business, and several late 16th-century printed copybooks contain examples for women to copy. The earliest writing book published by a woman survives in a unique, incomplete copy in the Newberry Library; it is Marie Pavie’s engraved copybook, which was probably printed in France about 1600. Pavie includes a Cresci-style italic and two forms of French secretary on each page. The scripts are ornately presented and surrounded by pen-drawn calligraphic borders similar to those found in other late-16th-century French writing books.

Maria Strick was a Dutch writing mistress who published four substantial writing books between 1609 and 1624, all engraved by her husband, Hans, who gave up his trade as a shoemaker to work on his wife’s books. Strick ran a French secular school for girls, first in Delft and later in Rotterdam. Her work, as was typical at the time, emphasized formal and informal Dutch secretary scripts and traditional italic writing. Her books demonstrate a mastery of flourishes and decorated initials. In a handwriting competition of 1620, her italic was judged best.

Calligraphy continued to evolve in the 17th century, and there was increasing emphasis on varieties of cancelleresca. Some writing masters began to call their version of this script italienne bastarde, or bastarde, in recognition of their alteration of this Italian hand. Others simply called it italique or lettera italiana. Regardless of the name, the hand had moved far from its early-16th-century prototypes. For example, at the beginning of the 17th century, writers began to change how the small letters were joined to each other. The bottom of some letters were connected to the top of others (en, for example) by a hairpin turn shape rather than at a sharp angle. Metal engraving was clearly a superior method of reproducing this type of delicate feature, which can be clearly seen in several plates in Les Oeuvres (“Works”), published in Avignon in 1608 by Lucas Materot. He called his style lettre bastarde or lettre Italienne-bastarde, and it would eventually influence 18th-century round hand and 19th-century copperplate. In another significant development, the use of flourishes became more prominent.

In Jan van den Velde’s Spieghel der Schrijfkonste (Rotterdam, 1605; “Mirror of the Art of Writing”), flourishing seems to be as important as the letters themselves. Made with the same pen as the writing and in a single uninterrupted line, the flourishes in Velde’s Spieghel range from variations on spirals and figure-eights to representations of various birds, beasts, and even a ship under sail. The Dutch especially excelled in pen decorations, and few important writing books appear without some form of flourishing for the rest of the century. For example, T’magazin oft’ pac-huys der loffelijcker pennconst (1616; “Stock of the Warehouse of Commendable Penmanship”), produced in Antwerp by David Roelands, includes calligraphic drawings of human and mythical figures, animals, ships, birds, monsters, and ornate initials; the book is more a display of what can be done with such penwork than it is a copybook.

Italian writing masters of the 17th century were soon playing catch-up with the Dutch: in 1619 Tomaso Ruinetti published his Idea del buon scrittore (“Ideal of the Good Writer”) which is more about calligraphic flourishes than about how to be a good writer. In Genoa in 1640, Francesco Pisani produced Tratteggiato da penna (“Drawn by Pen”), certainly the most elaborate writing book printed in 17th-century Italy. Pisani goes beyond the mere presentation of plants or animals to create—solely by means of flourishes—full compositions reminiscent of contemporary Italian drawings and paintings. On one page the roles of letters and flourishes are reversed, and the text forms the frame for a calligraphic drawing of St. George and the dragon. Elsewhere, some plates have only borders, and a blank space in the centre is perhaps meant to be filled in by the reader.

In England Edward Cocker, a prolific writing master, mathematician, and engraver who produced more than two dozen writing books, followed the Dutch and Italian lead in flourishing, but as the century wore on the tide was changing. Apparently fashion passed him by, for in his Pen’s Triumph (1658) Cocker rebuffs those who had criticized his pen decorations (or “knotts” as they were called because they looked as if they were tied-up pieces of string) with this punning verse:

Also in the late 1650s, the French writing master and secretary to the chamber of King Louis XIV, Louis Barbedor, published an expanded version of his Traité de l’art d’escrire (“Treatise on the Art of Writing”), in which he presents only two styles of writing, declaring them to be the only useful hands for government documents: the financière and the italienne bastarde. (Barbedor had been given the task of revising the official government scripts by the king’s minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.) Barbedor’s instructions for writing the italienne bastarde (which he saw as a near-universal hand for all sorts of nonfinancial documents) are precise: small letters slope 20 degrees to the right, are written with a broad-edged pen held at an angle of 22.5 degrees, and can be derived from the letters i and o. He does away with Cresci’s bulbous serifs on ascenders, either eliminating them entirely or replacing them with a little hook-shaped backstroke to the left of the letter stem. He treats capitals differently, writing them with a narrower flexible pen nib. Although he supplies no rules for forming capital letters, he does give two or three versions for most bastarde capitals, and he demonstrates some freedom in their creation. Flourishes serve their original medieval function of preventing written additions to official documents or correspondence. His flourishes appear above and below the text and at the end of every writing line, and they are made with a pen similar to the one used for capitals. For the most part they appear too heavy for the writing and lack the grace of earlier Dutch and Italian pen decorations.

The works of the late 17th- and early 18th-century English writing masters stand out by their quantity, quality, and influence on modern calligraphy and handwriting. English scribes of the period synthesized the works of 17th-century French and Dutch masters into a style they called round hand. One of the first English copybooks to show this new style is The New A-La-Mode Secretarie (c. 1680) by John Ayres; he identifies “bastard Italians” as “round-hands,” and his alphabets are nearly exact copies of Barbedor’s italienne bastarde. In A Tutor to Penmanship (1697/98), Ayres praises Materot, van den Velde, and Barbedor as great penmen who revived and disseminated the art of writing. Ayres also reminds readers that good handwriting is a source of employment, no matter what the occupation.

English writing masters did not hide their debt to continental masters even as they boasted of their own skills. For example, in The Pen-man’s Paradise (c. 1695) by John Seddon, this couplet appears underneath the author’s portrait: “When you behold this Face you look upon / The Great Materot & Velde all in One.” Seddon also proudly demonstrated flourishes that surround the text, in the manner of Pisani and Ruinetti.

English round hand is often mislabeled as copperplate or Spencerian script; the confusion arises from their similarities. All have a steep letter slope to the right (between 30 and 40 degrees), and they all have capitals with broad downstrokes. However, differences can readily be discerned. Round hand has a relatively wide proportion of width to height in its small letters, and they are joined by steeply angled (40–45 degree) hairlines. The script was written with a quill cut to a narrow point with a small square edge on its tip and a slit long enough to allow a certain amount of flexibility when pressure was applied in making downstrokes. Hairlines were extremely fine. The small o was made in one continuous stroke beginning at the top, moving down the left side in a curved motion and up the right side in a pushed stroke, and the right side of a round hand o, b, or e always shows a slight thickness in the northeast quadrant, reflecting the width of the edge of the nib.

Round hand was not an imitation of the fine lines produced by the engraver’s burin, although some modern writers have made that assertion. With few exceptions, engraving was considered a reproductive (as opposed to a creative) art in the 17th and 18th century. Prominent engravers such as John Sturt and George Bickham pointed out that engraving was no match for the pen in freedom or beauty and that the engraver depended on written copy.

Although English writing books continued to include other scripts such as black letter (which they called “German text”), various secretary hands, a slender, delicate “Italian” hand recommended for women, and a rather idiosyncratic hand used for law court records, round hand occupied most of their pages. By about 1725, it was the principal commercial and decorative hand. By mid-century most books showed only round hand and a few varieties of the German text hand; Roman capitals and minuscules were included mainly as display alphabets in titles and text headings. Command of hand was limited to decorating display alphabets or finishing off short lines of writing, and pen-made calligraphic pictures faded from the scene. By this time, flourishing was considered frivolous and unnecessary in business, for which the chief and singular virtue of penmanship was legibility. By the end of the century, writing books from Europe and the United States shifted their focus away from calligraphic qualities and toward the ideal of a legible and easy-to-learn hand.

By the end of the 18th century, as shown in The Art of Writing (1791) by the American John Jenkins, letters were reduced to a few simple, interchangeable parts. Legible penmanship became the overriding consideration, and methods of handwriting based on arm movement appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. (This approach was a major break from the earlier practice of making letters by using the fingers and wrist.) In the early 19th century straightforward “systematic writing” became the instructional norm.

With the perfection and mass production of the flexible metal pointed pen in the 1820s, calligraphy experienced a slight revival through the efforts of people such as the American Oliver B. Goldsmith, who was an early and strong advocate for the use of metal pens for writing and decoration. His Goldsmith’s Gems of Penmanship (1844) presents only examples written with metal pens, and it includes flourishes that evoke those in late-17th-century English copybooks. Goldsmith’s Gems is significant for two other reasons: it was among the first American books to use lithography for the reproduction of writing, and it was the first American copybook to describe a writing style as “copperplate.” Lithography and electrotyping (a relief process involving photoengraving) would replace engraving as a means of preparing writing books during the last half of the century. Flourishes and calligraphic drawings would continue to grace their title pages, primarily to attract buyers rather than to teach the styles. As Charles P. Zaner wrote in Zaner’s Gems of Flourishing (1888): “If you are a teacher of penmanship, much of your success depends, in many instances, upon your ability to flourish, as there is no one thing so easily and quickly made that will attract as much attention as a skillfully executed flourish.” Decorative alphabets and calligraphic images of plants and animals (especially birds) were produced in abundance in the last quarter of the century, but their quality was uniform and mechanical rather than individual and artistic. By the time the typewriter was introduced, in about 1870, writing professions were declining in visibility and prestige.

Revival of calligraphy (19th and 20th centuries)

The revival of calligraphy in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century was part of an a broader artistic revolt reaction against the mechanization of lifemanual crafts. About 1870 the English writer author, socialist, and artist William Morris had begun to concentrate attention on turned his attention to the ancient practice practices of scribes and began to study with pen on parchment the means of achieving similar results. In this fashion experiment with writing. Using quills, he wrote out and illuminated a number of texts, humanistic and medieval, in the years before he took up similarly the study of 15th-century printing prior to establishing the Kelmscott Press. His searching inquiries and patronage led papermakers and ink suppliersseveral manuscripts on parchment and paper; he later became interested in printing, and he established the Kelmscott Press in 1891. His inquiries into calligraphy and his patronage of the book arts induced paper and parchment makers, among others, back to revive forgotten manufacturing standards, and his study and collection of manuscripts inspired others to pursue calligraphy.

Among those who heeded the message was Edward Johnston. On the basis of the Morris investigations and guided particularly by Sydney Cockerell, Morris’ secretary, he rediscovered how to cut and sharpen reeds and quills, how to hold the chisel-nibbed pen so as to produce the kinds of writing that had become familiar in his study of old manuscripts, and every detail of how to make manuscripts. In 1899 he began teaching in London, first at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and, two years later, at the Royal College of Art. His early pupils soon became esteemed designers of lettering and influential calligraphers—e.g., Anna Simons, Eric Gill, Noel Rooke, Graily Hewitt, and Percy Smith. In 1906 he published the basic manual Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, 500 pages profusely illustrated with his own and Rooke’s drawings and with reproductions from historic manuscripts. In 1910 the book was published in Germany, where it supported the work independently begun by Rudolf von Larisch in Vienna and carried on by Rudolf Koch and Anna Simons. Under the Nazi regime, the Gothic exponents enjoyed a resurgence, but, after the war, such skilled young German calligraphers as Hermann Zapf led the way back to roman and italic script styles. Jan Tschichold’s work has been influential in the appreciation of classical letters for present-day uses.

Art schools everywhere gradually followed the Royal College of Art in offering courses in lettering and writing; these, along with sound forms, instilled a sense of responsibility to a rich heritage. Accordingly, type design passed from the engineers into the hands of artists and calligraphical scholars, such as Stanley Morison, Jan van Krimpen, Akke Kumlien, Bruce Rogers, Frederic W. Goudy, Victor Hammer, Berthold Wolpe, and Warren Chappell. The “freezing” of fine alphabets as font material stabilizes them and multiplies their influence. The effects were not limited to the printed or manuscript page or to book covers and jackets; all kinds of private and public markers and memorials, addresses, diplomas, and even the politicians’ ubiquitous testimonial “scrolls” were touched by reform or at least by some consciousness of shortcoming.

Though the United States was a decade behind Britain in organizing an arts and crafts movement, four years before Johnston’s book appeared a Boston architect, Frank Chouteau Brown, brought out a surprisingly sophisticated book, Letters and Lettering: A Treatise with 200 Examples (1902). He praised Morris’ initiative but wished for more classical balance; he pointed to the neglect of italics and gave them generous space, including specimens from the Lucas 1577 Arte de escrivir, “letra del Grifo,” bastarda, and others. In 1905 The Parable of the Prodigal Son, fashioned like a humanistic manuscript by William Addison Dwiggins and printed from photoengraved plates, was offered for sale. Dwiggins, as illustration for a talk on early writing books, copied a page out of the 1542 Tagliente he had picked up in Europe and passed out prints of it at the Dec. 29, 1913, meeting of the Society of Printers—thereby leading the revival of cancellaresca.

Edward Johnston’s pupils, and their pupils, organized in 1921 were indirectly inspired by Morris’s activities was the British calligrapher Edward Johnston, who explored medieval and Renaissance techniques and materials relating to manuscript preparation and writing. Starting with a version of half uncial, Johnston eventually settled on a 10th-century version of English Carolingian as a basic, or “foundational,” hand from which other calligraphic styles could be developed. He became an influential teacher of a generation of type designers and calligraphers; his Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering (1906), was a landmark work for the modern revival of calligraphy.

A calligraphic renaissance had already begun in Austria and Germany by then, through the efforts of the Austrian royal archivist Rudolf von Larisch, who lectured on lettering and typography in Vienna, and the type designer Rudolf Koch in Offenbach, Ger. The Germanic approaches to calligraphy in the early 20th century were quite distinct from English revivalism, especially in the German writers’ inclination to seek inspiration in writing materials. In 1905 von Larisch introduced the concept of the “language of materials” (Materialsprache) as applied to writing (Unterricht in ornamentaler Schrift; “Instruction in Ornamental Writing”). He examined the way letters were made with a variety of tools and, conversely, the effects the tools had on the letters. Von Larisch developed modern alphabets that emphasized the figure-ground relation between the letter and the writing surface. Rudolf Koch, who spent most of his working life at the Klingspor type foundry, used historic models as a springboard for his modernistic calligraphic and typographic inventions. His writing ranged from formal styles to densely massed blocks of black-letter text enlivened with bold, colourful initials. Like Johnston, Koch was a devoted and influential teacher.

Art and architecture schools in Europe and America gradually followed London’s Royal College of Art, where Johnston taught, in offering courses in lettering and calligraphy: these, along with the careful study of sound letter forms, instilled an awareness in students of the rich heritage of the alphabet. Accordingly, type design was taken over from technicians and engineers by lettering and calligraphic artists and scholars, including Stanley Morison, Jan van Krimpen, William Addison Dwiggins, Bruce Rogers, Frederic Goudy, and Hermann Zapf, who designed some of the best typefaces of the 20th century. This calligraphic-based tradition in type design has continued in the computer age with designers such as Charles Bigelow, Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Kris Holmes, and Sumner Stone, all of whom studied calligraphy before designing typefaces.

Before World War II English and German calligraphic influences came together in the United States. Ernst Detterer, who had studied with Edward Johnston in England in 1913, taught lettering and calligraphy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1921 to 1931. He later became custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where he was instrumental in building up an important collection of historical writing books. In 1941 he initiated a calligraphic study group at the library that included graphic artists and type designers such as R. Hunter Middleton, James Hayes, Ray DaBoll, and Bruce Beck.

George Salter moved to New York City from Germany in 1934 and in 1937 began teaching lettering and calligraphy at Cooper Union, where he inspired many students to enter the world of commercial lettering. He also designed hundreds of book jackets that incorporated his unmistakable calligraphic style and that doubtless influenced the many graphic artists who were exposed to them.

After World War II American interest in calligraphy began to spread beyond the area of graphic design, and both professional and amateur calligraphers were attracted to classes and demonstrations by Arnold Bank, a design professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Lloyd Reynolds, who taught italic handwriting to generations of students at Reed College, and other pioneering designers. Calligraphy was clearly becoming familiar to the general population: in 1947 Paul Standard, a skilled amateur calligrapher, published an article on italic handwriting in the popular Woman’s Day magazine.

Italic script, based on the styles of Arrighi and Palatino, had already become quite popular in the United Kingdom; in 1952 the Society for Italic Handwriting was founded there by the English calligrapher Alfred Fairbank, a pupil of Graily Hewitt. Fairbank, who was undoubtedly the strongest advocate for the italic hand in the 20th century, published his first manual on learning italic handwriting in 1932, and he continued to publish books and articles on this topic for the rest of his life. In 1954, more than 400 years after its first appearance, Arrighi’s La operina was translated by John Howard Benson as The First Writing Book. Benson wrote out his translation using both the layout and the writing style of the original; he included a facsimile of Arrighi’s work as well as notes on writing Arrighi’s italic.

In 1921 Edward Johnston’s students, and their students, had organized the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, “zealously directed toward the production of books and documents” by hand and the advancement of the crafts of member scribes, gilders, and illuminators. The program of this London-based professional groupbased in London is , which continued in the 21st century, was conducted by means of lectures, publications, and exhibitions, and membership was open to anyone interested in calligraphy. In the 1930s exhibits traveled to five American centres, as well as to Paris and Copenhagen. Members representing the several crafts have collaborated in the making of the rolls of honour for the Royal Air Force and United States Air Force, at St. Clement Danes Church, London. The society has served as a model for similar activities abroad, notably the organization in The Netherlands under the leadership of Jan van Krimpen. In 1952 the British society, with Alfred Fairbank as president, recognized the rising popular interest in italic handwriting by instituting the Society for Italic Handwriting, which soon attracted a large international membership of teachers and amateurs.

In the United States individual enthusiasts and informal groups fostered calligraphy outside the art schools. Ernst F. Detterer in Chicago, who had lessons from Johnston in 1913, headed such a group at the Newberry Library for many years and, when he died in 1947, was succeeded by James Hayes. In Portland, Ore., the instruction and copybooks of Lloyd J. Reynolds, a professor of art in Reed College, had significant influence. For decades Paul Standard in New York practiced and preached cancellaresca corsiva and saw the italic reform gain.

Since Johnston a series of manuals and copybooks centring attention on handwriting improvement have proceeded from the espousal of the rather heavy humanistic hand he admired to an italic that at least implies more speed. The fullest and most practical work on the italic is by Alfred John Fairbank, A Handwriting Manual (1932). The author places before his book as frontispiece a page of the bastarda of Lucas, Arte de escrivir, 1577. J.H. Benson’s The First Writing Book (1954) consists of the text and examples of the Arrighi Operina translated and admirably written out by the editor and furnished with practical clarifications and notes. Since Johnston calligraphical research and publishing activities have also produced a handsome and scholarly shelfful of books on related forms, most notably the Renaissance capitalslate 1960s the preeminent English scribe Donald Jackson went to the United States to give a series of lectures, workshops, and classes. Jackson sparked a renewed interest in calligraphy and illumination on both U.S. coasts, and in 1974 a group of calligraphers and lettering artists formed the first modern American calligraphic organization, the Society of Scribes. Other groups were formed in the 1970s and ’80s, and by the end of the century there were calligraphic organizations in nearly every state. These organizations sponsored workshops, classes, lectures, and journals, and they joined together for an annual week-long national calligraphy conference. Other calligraphic revivals began during the last quarter of the 20th century in Canada, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.

Printing technology played a role in the calligraphic revival of the 1970s. By then photocopiers had become widely available, so that instructional handouts and model sheets were easy to produce. Publishers issued new writing manuals and reprinted some older ones, some in facsimile; several professional journals reproduced commercial and artistic cutting-edge calligraphic work. Fountain pens and fibre-tip markers were manufactured for broad-edged calligraphy, and materials for various styles of writing once again became readily available to calligraphers.

Radical changes in the aesthetics of the art followed the renewed interest in calligraphy in the late 20th century. Some of the younger practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic began to de-emphasize text in favour of letterforms and gesture, moving calligraphy in the direction of contemporary painting and drawing. Especially noteworthy are the works of Denis Brown, Thomas Ingmire, Suzanne Moore, Brody Neuenschwander (whose work appears in many of the films of Peter Greenaway), Eliza Schulte, and Susan Skarsgard. Their work goes well beyond the formal, traditional calligraphy in which they were all trained. These artists and the thousands of amateurs who practice calligraphy have ensured the vitality of contemporary calligraphy.

Many institutions and libraries around the world contain calligraphic manuscripts and printed books, but only a few specialize in such holdings. Noteworthy in the United States are the Hofer Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; the Plimpton Collection in the Columbia University Library, New York City; the Wing Foundation in the Newberry Library, Chicago; and the Harrison Collection in the San Francisco Public Library. In Europe notable collections are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Ditchling Museum, Sussex, Eng.; the Holburne of Menstrie Museum, Bath, Eng.; and the Klingspor Museum, Offenbach, Ger.